Professional Learning Communities at Work TM. Robert Eaker
effort. But it is imperative that these initiatives also consider what happens in the heart of the school’s enterprise—the classroom. Unfortunately, restructuring seems to have left students virtually untouched by the reforms that swirl around, but not within, their classrooms. So the Restructuring Movement, like the Excellence Movement before it, has been unable to make a real difference in the ability of American schools to meet the challenges they face.
Succumbing to Despair
The failure of the Restructuring Movement seems to have led to unprecedented levels of despair about the possibility of school improvement in the United States. Because neither top-down nor bottom-up school reform have proven to be successful, there is a growing tendency to conclude that American schools are simply incapable of transformation. The Consortium on Productivity in the Schools (1995) concludes that schools resist any meaningful change efforts, have changed very little despite all efforts to reform them, and are unable to learn and improve. A review of the research on school innovation led to “the profoundly discouraging” conclusion that “almost all educational innovations fail in the long term” (Perkins, 1992, p. 205). Michael Fullan (1997b) writes that “none of the current strategies being employed in educational reform result in substantial widespread change…. The first step toward liberation, in my view, is the realization that we are facing a lost cause” (p. 220). In a 1996 sequel to a book on school change that he had written 25 years earlier, Seymour Sarason lamented the failure of efforts to reform American education and observed that the single greatest change since he had written his first book was “the sense of disillusionment with and disappointment in our schools” (p. 345).
The inability of the Restructuring Movement to achieve the anticipated results has not only discouraged educational theorists, but has also caused some besieged educators to respond to the constant criticism of their schools with growing defensiveness and resignation. According to a recent report on teacher perceptions, most teachers believe that schools are doing as well as possible given the societal problems and lack of parental involvement (Farkas & Johnson, 1996). From the perspective of these teachers, the improvements that must occur for schools to be more effective must be made outside of the school environment. For example, many educators suggest that schools cannot become more productive until students take more responsibility for their learning. According to this argument, students must decide whether they will come to school, be attentive, complete their homework, and try to learn. This argument assumes that these decisions are not influenced by what happens at school. Benjamin Levin (1994) is among those who contend that the focus of reform should shift from improving educators and schools to improving the children we send there:
Students must do the learning; there is no way around this fact. Whatever schools provide, whatever teachers do, in the end it is the student who must use the resources to acquire skills and knowledge…. Every teacher realizes that what happens in a class is fundamentally dependent on who students are, how they make sense of the world, and what they want to do or do not want to do…. [E]very educator recognizes that our best laid plans may, and often do, come to nothing in the face of students with different agendas. (p. 759)
A variation on this theme is to cite the many problems in society that must be solved before schools can become more effective. Forty percent of those living in poverty in the United States are children. This is the highest percentage of any industrialized nation. One of every three babies born in this country is born to a single mother, and 30% of those single mothers are teenagers. Children aged 12 to 15 are the most likely group in America to be the victims of violent crime, and over 4,000 children are murdered each year. By the eighth grade, seven of ten children have consumed alcohol. The youth population of the United States is becoming increasingly fragmented with more students from minority groups and more students who do not speak English, live in broken homes, are disadvantaged in every way, and are subject to violence in the community (Hodgkinson, 1996; Mehlinger, 1995). Some educators argue that they cannot be expected to improve schools until these societal problems are solved. As Mehlinger (1995) contends, “If America’s poor children could be provided the same conditions for growing up, including the same quality of schools, as those afforded to middle-class suburban youth, we would have no crisis (in education) at all” (p. 27).
Another response to mounting criticism among members of the education community is to challenge the premise that schools are ineffective. Books such as Berliner and Biddle’s The Manufactured Crisis (1995), Schneider and Houston’s Exploding the Myths (1993), and Bracey’s Setting the Record Straight (1997) have blatantly refuted some of the allegations aimed at public education in the United States and have argued that schools in this country are indeed more effective than ever. Such major professional education associations as the American Association of School Administrators, the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development, and the National Education Association have distributed the findings of these “revisionist” works and have also encouraged their members to use the findings in defending their efforts.
While these defensive responses on the part of weary educators are entirely understandable, they do nothing to create the conditions that are critical to improving schools. If teachers and principals believe that the impetus for student learning remains outside of their influence and that there is nothing they can do to overcome these external variables, the idea of school improvement will undoubtedly seem futile, if not downright ridiculous! Unfortunately, if educators continue to argue that they cannot be responsible for students’ learning until the problems of society are solved, they are essentially saying that they will never accept responsibility for their students’ learning. If they are content with the assertion that “we are not as bad off as everyone says we are,” they will not create organizations capable of continuous improvement.
We are not prepared to accept the conclusion that it is impossible to improve schools. Nor do we believe that improvement can only occur when parents provide schools with a better class of students and society has solved its problems. Although much of the popular criticism of schools has been unfair and unfounded, we do not believe that educators should accept the status quo. Even Gerald Bracey (1997), one of the most ardent defenders of American schools, cautions that his work should not be interpreted to suggest that schools are not in need of significant reform. If future efforts to improve schools are to be more productive than their predecessors, they should address two questions:
1. Why have past school improvement efforts not achieved their intended results?
2. What course of action offers the best hope for those who seek to make their schools more effective?
Why Educational Reform Has Failed to Deliver
The complexity of the task. Changing any organization is difficult, but changing something as complex as the American system of education is an absolutely daunting task. Fifty states operate over 15,000 relatively autonomous school districts through more than 80,000 school board members who employ over 200,000 district administrators, 120,000 principals, and 2.5 million teachers for the 84,000 schools that serve over 43 million students. But the scope of the effort is not the only obstacle to be overcome. Our educational system is fundamentally conservative. As Fullan (1993) writes, “The way that teachers are trained, the way the hierarchy operates, and the way that education is treated by political decision makers results in a system that is more likely to retain the status quo than to change” (p. 3).
Furthermore, while Americans are quick to identify education as a national problem, they consistently express satisfaction with the schools in their own communities (Elam, Rose, & Gallup, 1997). In fact, results from the annual Gallup Poll seem to suggest that educators are conducting their local schools in accordance with community expectations. Effecting change in this amorphous, fundamentally conservative “system,” when educators seem fatalistic or defensive and when parents indicate that their schools are serving the community well, has been and will continue to be an incredibly complex, intractable problem.
Misplaced focus. The good news is that there are strategies for school improvement that can make a difference in the effectiveness of schools. The bad news is that neither the Excellence Movement nor the Restructuring Movement focused on these strategies.
Lack